


a few issues that need to be resolved

by suitablyskippy



Category: Mukuro Naru Hoshi Tama Taru Ko | Shadow Star
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Violence, screwed-up kids forming a screwed-up alliance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 16:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’re here to discuss a better world,” says Sudo, quietly, after a moment. Slowly, Satomi’s fists unclench; slowly, Komori sheathes his knife. “A world where those who live are those who have earned the right to live.”</p><p>“Oh, God,” says Bungo, and drops his face into his hands. “No offence, Sudo-kun, but I <em>knew</em> you were too good to be true.”</p><p>(Before they had their shadow dragons, and before they were a team, and before they had a plan - they were all still just as fucking weird.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	a few issues that need to be resolved

**takano bungo & ozawa satomi**

“You’re being stupid,” says Satomi, who is walking with her shoulders back, and her posture very straight, and her head held regally high. “You’re _entirely_ stupid.”

“Stupid?” says Bungo, “ _stupid_?” and when he looks round Satomi’s glower veers immediately off from him toward the meadow, and he laughs. “Don’t you reckon you mean irresistible?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she says, icily. 

“I’ll stop flattering myself if you’ll do it for me,” says Bungo, at once. “How about it? Like an experiment? Throw a few kind words my way, I might just shut up! You’ve never tried it before, we’ve got no idea if it works!”

“You’re – _ugh_!” He watches as she fumes, and he grins, and then she squeezes the red leather strap of her satchel tight and rounds on him in steaming, pink-cheeked fury. “You are _unbearable_. Your jokes are unsophisticated, your clothing is tacky, your grades are the kind of grades I see in my _nightmares_ – you’re not of a class with me, Bungo, I’m _so_ far out of your league –”

“But you love it, eh?”

“I resent the very day your mother met mine,” says Satomi, primly, and then her eyes pop wide and her movements stutter: one jerky tremor runs through her and she drops, gasping, to her knees on the muddy damp woodchip path. 

He’s at her side before she’s even got her breath back. “Are you hurt? Are you ill? Satomi –”

“I can –” She doubles up and keens, a weird soft sound he’d rather kill than ever hear her make again. Her hair’s trailing in the dirt so he scoops it back and holds it, rubs her neck and worries while she pants. “I can –”

“I’ll call you an ambulance,” he says, and fumbles in his jacket pocket with his free hand for his cell, “I can carry you back to the main road and it can pick us up from there – it’ll be okay, you’ll definitely be okay –”

“You idiot,” says Satomi, and her voice is hoarse and breathless but when she grabs his wrist her grip’s so tight he drops his cell on reflex, and winces. “You idiot – I can _see_ us.”

“You can – see us?”

She pushes herself up and stands, slowly, stiffly, like she’s forgotten how to operate the levers and pulleys of her body. “I can see you twice,” she says. “I can see _me_ – and there are – two of me?”

Bungo tracks her gaze into a bright ditzy patch of wildflowers off the side of the footpath, and then he looks back at her. “You’re probably concussed,” he says, “or something.” Her eyes are wide and fixed. “Probably got some kind of temporary – thing going on. I dunno, medicine’s not exactly my speciality. Can you walk?”

“Yes,” says Satomi. She lets go of his wrist. She starts to walk toward the wildflowers and her posture is still perfectly upright. 

“Satomi!”

“Wait here,” she says, utterly confident that he will, so he does. The day is cloudy and her shadow’s pale and weak behind her; when she wades off the path and into long damp grass she makes a small sound of revulsion that reassures him. If she’s enough in her right mind to remember she hates mess, it can’t be _that_ bad – she can’t be _that_ out of sorts –

She pauses, and then abruptly she drops and bursts back up again, spinning to face him in the middle of a wildflower field with an expression of rapture and her arms held out to him, and in her arms: something shaped like a star, rounded at the edges, glistening a smooth and slimy bottle green. It’s limp, and its top point is pink, and set into that point are two vacant bugged-out eyes. 

“What the hell is that?” says Bungo. 

“It’s mine,” says Satomi. 

The star flaps an arm. Its movements are gooey, gelatinous. 

“Is it – alive?” he says, uneasily. 

“I think it’s as alive as I make it,” says Satomi, and she picks her way back through the grass and flowers toward him with a smile that’s more unself-conscious than anything he’s seen on her in years. “I _knew_ I was destined for something great – I _knew_ I was special –”

She sets the star carefully down on the woodchip path before them. They stand side by side and watch it, curling the tips of its arms weakly in the cool spring air. 

“So,” says Bungo, after a moment, and he glances between it and her, its empty upward stare and her furiously focused one, “d’you reckon it’s an alien?”

“Shut up,” says Satomi. The star stops twitching, and then it raises slowly off the ground and turns in the air till it’s facing them, floating, wall-eyed. “I did that,” she says. 

“Did what?” The star tilts and keeps tilting till it’s floating upside down. “You’re – controlling it?”

She holds out her arms to the star and it barrels into her with such force she wheezes, and it slides up across her chest and round onto her shoulders and hugs her head from behind, still dead-eyed, still gooey. She reaches up and pets it. It doesn’t react. “ _And_ I’m seeing what it sees. _And_ I’m feeling what it feels.”

“Oh, God,” says Bungo. 

Satomi makes as though to toss her hair and then she remembers there’s a monster on her shoulders; so she tucks it back with her hand instead, and smirks. “If you’re jealous, which you must be, please don’t feel you have to hide it on _my_ account.”

“Jealous of your brain-dead blob monster? I don’t think so,” he says, and then very suddenly the field and the path and the flowers double in his vision and the world gives a sick lurch and separates, and he claps his hand to his mouth and tries not to retch. 

“Bungo – _Bungo_! –”

“When you saw through the, that thing, when you –” he grabs her elbow for balance, and she shakes him off and he stumbles, “– was it double vision? Like, you felt sick? And like the inside of your head’s – gotten bigger?”

“Yes,” says Satomi, and then panic flashes through her. “You’re not telling me that _you_ –”

“Oh, man,” says Bungo, and he turns a full circle gazing at the view, and the low hills on the city’s outskirts, and trying to match what he sees there with what he’s also seeing elsewhere, which is dense undergrowth shot through by daylight and coral-coloured flowers nodding gently in the breeze on the other side. He doesn’t know – but he _feels_ – that his creature is further off, maybe – beyond the meadow? into the shadows of the woods beyond it? He opens his hands wide and distinctly feels the brush of grass against his palms. “Satomi, you’re gonna have to trust me when I say I never meant to steal your thunder!”

“You’re joking,” she says. Her star clutches protectively at her temples but its huge round eyes are still blank, still unfocused. “You must be joking. There’s no way you’d have one too. Not _you_.”

“Sorry!” says Bungo, cheerily. “If it’s gonna make it easier on your ego, we could just keep going and ignore it –” and Satomi smacks his shoulder in fury when he laughs, but it doesn’t stop him. 

\---

 

**sudo naozumi**

Sudo sits with his back to his bedroom wall. His bare feet are stretched out before him; his hands are folded in his lap. Every few moments he moves – to curl a finger, or flatten out his palm, or cut a slight slice in the air – but he’s still. He’s very still. Except for his mat and sheets laid out on the floorboards, he keeps his bedroom empty. 

In the next room the screams have died. The walls of the family’s house are thin, fragile to the touch. A tilt of his hand – his shadow dragon retracts the rotary blade back into itself – as the whirring stops the smaller noises grow clearer, and Sudo can hear his father’s final liquid burbles for himself, without even needing to share his dragon’s senses. 

He walks it backwards, out of range of the rapidly spreading blood puddles. He and it cleared the living room together, before his family returned home from his brother’s gymnastics display: the sofa is pushed back against the wall. The coffee table is balanced on top. The floorboards are covered with thin plastic sheeting and blood pools in the dips and crinkles. 

The bits and pieces that were and are his family have gotten just as still as Sudo. “Good,” he says, and it’s the only sound in the apartment till his shadow dragon starts to pull the corners of the sheeting together, plastic rustling and blood slopping and flesh hitting flesh with a damp dull thud in the gory centre of the bundle. 

It pulls the bundle to the sliding doors of the veranda, triples the length of a limb to stretch it out and slide them back, and – watching his actions through its eyes, in the murky twilight shadows – Sudo moulds the dragon’s form with his thoughts till it’s long and flat, fortified with the kind of inward-arching spikes that’ll let the plastic sheeting and its contents balance safely on its back while it flies. 

He sits with his back to his bedroom wall. He’s gazing at the blank white wall across from him but what he’s watching is the city pass below his dragon: exhaust fumes making the twinkle of streetlights hazy, pollution making the twinkle of window-lights misty. Clouds brush by him; the floorboards are hard beneath him. 

Dawn’s rising by the time the dragon returns from the ocean, and he directs it to drag the sofa and the coffee table to the veranda and drop them off the side. They land hard; springs squeal; something shatters. The backyard is his property: he’ll dispose of them more fully later. 

Sudo surveys the main room through its eyes one final time, and then he unfolds himself up from the floor and rubs the stiffness out his legs and cricks his neck, and he slides back his bedroom door, and he goes into the main room. His dragon stands in the doorway to the veranda and casts a long shadow out across the boards before it. Its silhouette is squat and tapered against the day’s early pink light. 

The room is empty, and the room is clean, and the room is exactly how Sudo wants it. 

“Good,” he says again, and he goes back into his bedroom. His dragon’s weariness is so great it’s weighing him down too, now; so he’ll sleep, and when he wakes he’ll clear the rest of the house of the burdens his family filled it with. There is nothing more important for anything in the world than full utility. 

\---

 

**ozawa satomi & takano bungo**

“D’you reckon they like us?” says Bungo, conversationally, and Satomi – who is sitting sidesaddle on her star with her knees neatly folded, floating it slowly forward, her feet barely inches off the rough stone hiking trail – turns a look of withering incredulity toward him. 

“We _control_ them,” she says. “It doesn’t _matter_ if they like us.”

“Sure, sure, I know that. Just – curious, is all.” Bungo’s star is pale pink and permanently smiling, the tiniest upward slash in its purple face; it’s flying with its limbs tucked in, a little way above him. He’s trudging along behind Satomi, his hands wedged deep down in his jacket pockets. “Like, if they could choose – would they choose us?”

“Didn’t they already?” she says, and he shrugs, and smiles, and she rolls her eyes and heaves an exasperated breath. Her star picks up the pace a little so she presses a hand to her hair to stop it whipping in the breeze. “That necklace is ridiculous, by the way. If you don’t take it off before we go home, I’ll refuse to walk beside you.”

“Pulling out the big guns, huh?”

“Sarcasm,” says Satomi, with a contemptuous glance she’s practised to perfection in her mother’s cloudy bedside mirror, “is _beyond_ juvenile.” 

But Bungo’s staring up to the sky, his mouth hanging so stupidly open that the memory of where she’s permitted that mouth to go sets her heart to clenching sickly in her chest. _Standards_ – it’s embarrassing she ever let hers slip so far as him. 

“I feel – like I’m getting stronger,” he says, and his voice is strange: more uncertain than she’s ever heard it. “Inside my head. Satomi – look –”

Satomi levels him a dubious glower for a moment, but his bewilderment doesn’t fade so with one authoritative thought she calls her star to a halt, and she looks. 

Up above them his pale pink star is stretching. Its limbs drag out like gum caught between the sidewalk and a sneaker and its smile tugs out wider and wider across its face, which twists – “Whoa,” says Bungo, awestruck – and blurs and recolours and reshapes. 

“Are you doing that?” says Satomi, sharply. “Are you changing it?”

The star – _barely_ a star, a slowly warping monstrous _goop_ – is rising. It’s higher than their heads; it’s higher than the treeline. “No,” says Bungo, but his look is deliriously glad – like he doesn’t even _mind_ losing his control – so Satomi grabs her skirt to stop it ruching and swings her leg across her star to straddle it. 

_Come on_ , she thinks, _let’s get his bullshit sorted_ , and it swoops up after the now rapidly melting pink blob, floating in the cloudy sky. 

“It’s fine!” he hollers up after her, “I’m in its _head_ , Satomi – it’s fine! Whatever it’s doing, it’s not a problem, I feel _great_! Terrific! Come back!”

Satomi digs her fingers into the back of her star; it reshapes its back around her fingers. Bungo’s has stopped moving and it looks horrific, the way it is, twisted and distorted with its stupid crossed eyes wider and dumber than ever. She nudges hers on. 

“Can’t you bring it back?” she calls. 

“Damn,” says Bungo, which is _not_ an answer, and in the moment she flicks her gaze from his star down to him his star _moves_ : hers dives back below the dense cover of the pine trees and her stomach lurches with the drop, and she swivels round to watch in horror as the limbs of Bungo’s star whip gloopily out, one after the other, and remake and solidify on new patterns – and her star pitches beneath her again and she grabs it with both hands, too high to fall – “Damn,” says Bungo, again, reverently – and the edges of his star blur one final time before settling. 

It’s not a star floating up above him, any more: it’s a life-sized ball-and-socket doll with no arms and no feet, and the cutesiest smile, and the most grossly, implausibly muscular hands, hanging from wings as fragile as Satomi’s sense of calm is feeling. 

“Well!” says Bungo. “This is – pretty embarrassing, huh?”

“It’s disgusting,” says Satomi, who can’t tear her eyes from _its_ eyes: huge and unblinking, with a sweet and permanent glitter that simply does not _exist_ outside of animation. “You can control it?”

The creature whips back its wings and soars up and plummets down, clumsy taloned fists trailing out behind it. “Yep.”

“Okay,” says Satomi. “So it must be an evolution. Okay. Come on –” and her star flies her smoothly down. She dismounts beside Bungo, and straightens the wrinkles of her skirt as he watches his – star? his angel? his _creature_ – swoop across the dark pine treetops, his expression pure concentration and his hands sometimes clenching, tilting, curling as it takes a tighter angle in its flight. “Tell me how you did it.”

“I didn’t do anything,” he says, absently, “I just – oh, _man_ –” as it tucks and dives, “– thought about it. What it meant to me. You know. Shit, Satomi, _look_ at her!”

“It’s not a her,” says Satomi. Her star floats beside her, a dark green that’s brighter and less natural than the green of the pines packed densely in around them on the rocky mountain path. Its eyes wobble vacantly off in no particular directions. What it means to her? – _power_ , she thinks, and _authority_ ; and then _revenge_ , she adds, with a private smirk Bungo’s too lost in the skies to notice, and she runs her hand down the smooth cool side of her star’s pointed head. “You’re the most important thing to me,” she whispers, out loud but barely. 

Its eyes don’t focus but it rises. She tilts back her head and watches. 

Bungo’s clawed abomination of a monster fetish doll slows in its aerial acrobatics and sinks down toward them, gone still and unattended. He reaches for her hand and she lets him take it. _Be something horrific_ , she’s thinking, viciously, as she watches her star’s first contortions, its first warped gluey stretches. _Be a nightmare. Be worse than his._

When it elongates and snaps out then back in and shows its form – a four-pointed red flower with a thick barbed stem, curling and unfurling coyly every time she glares at it – she’s less than impressed. 

Bungo squeezes her hand and she shakes him off. 

“What are you gonna call it?” he says. 

“Why should I call it anything?” she says, gazing up into its round yellow centre. Bungo twitches an eyebrow at her. “Why,” says Satomi, again, and she smiles, as sweetly as she can force it, “should I call it _anything_ – when it’s mine? Do you name your guns?”

“Yeah,” says Bungo, and shrugs. His creature floats a little way behind him, curiously clenching and unclenching its vast purple fists. 

“Oh,” says Satomi, thrown momentarily off track. “That’s weird.” The view she gets through her monster’s eyes is clearer than before; she can see the awkwardly gelled angles of Bungo’s bangs but she can also see the grossly gelatinous fringing of his creature’s wings, in all their soft and graceful glory. It’s _utterly_ disgusting. 

“Whatever you say,” says Bungo, and when he beckons it down toward him it glides in, smiling like rigor mortis and glassy-eyed. “I’m gonna get Googling for some good names this evening, I reckon. You want me to find some for you?”

Satomi gestures hers down too, and studies it. Its eyes are black and barely dots, set in deep as seedpods to its face. Its petals billow out around it in a vast red cup when she wills them to. When she wills it, they press in close together, too, and they twist into hands, and they stretch out long and fine and ready to throttle. “No,” she says. “It’s fine. I’ll name it myself.”

They leave their monsters there and hike back down the mountain together on foot. That night Satomi wakes with her neck creeping like there’s someone very close to it and she jackknifes upright in her bed, breathing hard; her sight flickers sickly dark and light and back and forth for a moment till she straightens it out and realises: her tall flower is bobbing idly in a clearing, deep in the dark green depths of the forest, and behind it Bungo’s creature is floating with its wings wrapped out and round it. 

Satomi watches it through her flower’s eyes for a minute or so, its polished plasticky chest motionless, lifeless, unconscious for as long as Bungo’s unconscious; and then she rolls over to press her face into her pillow and slides back down into jumbled, uncomfortable dreams. 

\---

 

**komori tomonori**

When Komori gets in from school his mother’s heaved herself up and into her wheelchair, and she’s in the backyard, pale and dozy and staring aimlessly at his rabbit run. A few of the rabbits are staring back. 

“What are you out here for?” he says, from the kitchen door. 

“Weren’t your rabbits white, last time I saw them?” 

“Of course they weren’t,” says Komori, and steps down onto the dry brown summer grass. His mother sighs; it’s a weak, empty sound. If it’s such a struggle for her to breathe she should _stop_. “Is there a history of dementia in our family or _what_?”

One of the rabbits lurches up, presses its front paws to the run’s chickenwire walls and watches, attentively. “There’s no need to be rude,” says his mother, and pulls her blanket up around her. 

“It was a totally serious question,” says Komori, but his mother’s chair isn’t facing toward him and he can’t be bothered putting in the effort to make it sound affronted, so it comes out flat, and insincere, which is precisely how he meant it. “Come on. Back in.”

She’s pissed her sheets so he tells her it’s not a problem and changes them. It’ll be a death sentence, one day – he tucks the corners – it’ll be a capital offence – he shakes out her pillows and props them up against the headboard at the low angle he knows she likes them best, and she thanks him, her voice breathy and feeble – not having even enough control of your body to stop yourself _pissing_ it will be a mark of existence _undeserved_ , and it’ll be _righteous_ to cull offenders – 

“Will you be out late?” says his mother, and in his room Komori swings his empty backpack onto his shoulders, and pulls on a checked green-and-white flat cap, and smirks at his irresistible reflection in his mirror. 

“Couldn’t say,” he calls back. 

The rabbits snuffle in agitation when he scoops them up from the pen. There’s a bit of spitting when he loads all five into his backpack but it’s entirely ineffectual against him and mostly they’re docile, anyway: which is why they’re ideal. He zips it and pulls it back on, and stands in the yard holding the straps, squinting up, watching his dragon get closer and watching through his dragon’s eye as _he_ gets closer. A grey speck driving down from the wide blue sky; a pale speck waiting keenly in a dried-out backyard. It’s a perfect symmetry – a perfect symbol of their unity. 

They tear straight up into the sky. Komori grips its blunted blade with one hand and holds down his cap with the other, and once they’re high enough he clambers to his feet and lets Push Dagger file itself back down to razored edges: as he surfs across the city the wind shrieks where it hits them. The rabbits are heavy and squirming in his backpack. 

It’s a profitable evening. Dusk doesn’t fall till after eight and when it does he makes the most of it as a new challenge for attack – if his vision is impeded will his aim be too? and how is Push Dagger’s night vision? and just how hard is a rabbit to spot, running and running with its little white tail bobbing in the gloom between the trees? – and in the end, when he lets loose the largest rabbit one last time and brings it to a shaking squealing halt with Push Dagger slammed down into the ground just millimetres from its nose, he reckons he’s done well. His control is high; his aim is almost faultless; his link is so strong he no longer gets dizzy when his dragon’s plunging from the skies at sickening speeds and he’s on his feet and watching through it, deep in the heart of the woods and powerful. 

“Not bad,” Komori tells Push Dagger, and its bulging blue eye rolls to follow him as he scoops up the corpses of the rabbits that didn’t get lucky. “Here –” and he drops them on its back, and sends it slicing round the trees and up the steep incline toward the peak of the hill where he stops it and flips it, so they tumble down and hit the ground with a heavy sodden thump. 

Push Dagger soars back down and halts abruptly beside him. The two rabbits left living are already zipped back inside his backpack, so Komori adjusts his cap, and climbs back on. 

“Tomo-kun?” whispers his mother, when she hears the scrape of the kitchen door on the tiles. 

He shuffles off his shoes and locks it. “Go to sleep,” he says. 

“Where have you been?”

“Nowhere.”

“But I heard you –”

“Nowhere,” he says, louder, and he crosses the shadowy kitchen to run himself a glass of water. Tomorrow he’ll look up a new pet shop, one far enough out of town it doesn’t raise alarms, and Push Dagger will fly him there. His aim is almost faultless; _almost_ faultless is worthless. 

\---

 

**the star chamber club (ensemble)**

“It wouldn’t make sense to start without our final member,” says Sudo. “Not when it was we who invited him here.”

“It was _you_ who invited him,” says Satomi, and Sudo bows his head in acknowledgement. “ _God_ ,” she huffs, and Bungo watches her fingers dig into the duvet, and knows she’s anxious. This kid: they know he’s got a monster – a dragon, he calls them, shadow dragons, corpse dragons – and they know he knows _they’ve_ got dragons, and they know he’s short on words and big on manners, and they know he’s got plans, and they think he’s got connections – but really, what they know about Sudo Naozumi is nothing at all. 

“In a way,” says Sudo, who’s sitting on the motel room’s single bare wooden chair, elbows propped on knees, “he is to be our leader.”

“Oh, _sure_ ,” says Satomi, wide-eyed and insincere, and then she turns to Bungo and mutters: “Give him five and then we leave – right?”

Bungo glances up at Sudo, who’s watching them with a smile so tranquil it’s more than a little weird, and then he looks back to Satomi, who has raised her eyebrows at him in a glower that suggests she’s gonna slice his balls right off if he doesn’t agree. “I gotta say,” he tells her, and shrugs, “I’m pretty curious.”

There’s a scuffle in the corridor and then the door slams back. 

“Komori Tomonori,” says the kid who comes in, and a knife as high as him with a single blue eye rolling in a red metal socket floats behind him. “My dragon’s Push Dagger. Ready for a new world order, huh?”

“You shouldn’t have brought your dragon,” says Sudo, quietly. 

“Who’s gonna stop me?” says Komori, and he kicks the door shut behind him. He’s wearing a pale brown beret. It looks kind of ridiculous. “You guys – you must be my new followers.”

“Hey,” says Bungo. 

“I am _not_ your follower,” says Satomi. 

“Great to meet you,” says Komori, and his knife dragon hangs motionless a little way below the ceiling as he hops up to sit on the desk beside the TV. “I made an agenda for the meeting, by the way.”

“I thought perhaps we could approach discussion in – a slightly more _democratic_ manner, Komori-kun,” says Sudo. 

“You really think we’re fighting for _democracy_?” scoffs Komori, and he slings a black backpack round onto his lap and rummages through its contents. “Here – and here – and here –” He hands a sheet of folded paper to Sudo; he tosses two more toward the bed. 

“Never hurts to be prepared,” Bungo agrees, amiably, and he picks the papers up and hands one to Satomi, who is sitting very upright with her hands folded on her knees, vivisecting Komori with the razor edges of her glare. “ _Does_ it, Satomi?” 

She holds the glare for a moment longer then drops it, and takes the paper, and stiffly unfolds it; and Bungo does the same. 

After a moment, he looks back up. “This just says ‘genocide’.”

Komori’s smirking, cross-legged on the desk with his chin in his hand. “D’you get it?” he says. “The joke? The only thing _on_ my agenda is genocide!” 

Across the room, beside the shuttered window, Sudo sighs. “I don’t think there’s any need for you to make us agendas again, Komori-kun.” 

“Didn’t plan to,” says Komori, and he sits back with a look of great self-satisfaction. “That’d kill the joke. And –” he pauses, puts out his tongue and bites it in a way that’s weirdly, discordantly mischievous, “– it’s not jokes I wanna kill!”

“You’re _incredibly_ embarrassing,” says Satomi, sounding pained, and: “You’re not as pretty as you think,” Komori snaps back, at once, and her hands squeeze into fists and in his is suddenly a knife, and a silence falls very hard and very fast in the cramped motel room. 

“We’re here to discuss a better world,” says Sudo, quietly, after a moment. It’s the same soft, even tone Bungo’s never heard him _not_ use, but this time it seems strong: hard to ignore. Slowly, Satomi’s fists unclench; slowly, Komori sheathes his knife. “A world where those who live are those who have earned the right to live.”

“Oh, God,” says Bungo. 

“A world people must earn their place in.” His voice is still so soft, still so unassuming. “There will be no entitlement to life. A world built on the bodies of the useless.”

“Oh, God,” says Bungo, again, and drops his face into his hands. “No offence, Sudo-kun, but I _knew_ you were too good to be true.” 

“Only the strong and the healthy left standing!” Komori declaims it like a slogan, gazing up at the peeling ceiling with a look of rapture that comes and goes just as fast as it takes him to say it. Bungo glances desperately round at Satomi for a little shared sanity but she’s closed over, expression unreadable. 

“I imagine the rate of overlap between the useless and the sick _is_ likely to be high, once we get started,” agrees Sudo, mildly. “This is our vision, Ozawa-san, Takano-kun. Not a world _led_ by dragon bearers – but a world _formed_ by us.”

“Uh – it _will_ be a world led by dragon bearers.” Komori’s knife dragon swings abruptly down from upright to horizontal, its glinting point levelled toward Sudo: who doesn’t flinch. “ _Me_. _I’m_ gonna be in charge.”

“It’s not a perfect plan,” Sudo tells them, calmly, from behind the knife, and Bungo smiles back in a kind of glassily horrified reflex action. “Not yet, at least. There are still a few issues that need to be resolved. Mainly Komori-kun’s. But what we want – _whichever_ way you look at it – is a world where humanity can start afresh.”

“No,” says Komori, “it’s a world where we can _kill_ most of humanity.”

“There are some ideological sticking points,” concedes Sudo. 

“Well!” says Bungo, after a moment of silence in which Komori’s dragon turns itself back up to vertical and glides near enough Komori can rest his hand possessively on its pommel, “thanks? It’s great you thought of us, but _no_ thanks –” and at the same time Satomi says: “I’m in,” and Bungo jolts away from her in shock. 

“Satomi? You _kidding_?”

“What?” she says, and her voice is steel. “This world is filled with pathetic people. We’re of a better class than that. And we’ve been given our shadow dragons – the world clearly agrees.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how shadow dragons work,” says Bungo, and he starts to laugh it off but Satomi’s narrowed her eyes at him, lowered her voice for him, and she’s not joking. He stares back at her, uneasy. 

“I hate this world,” she says. Every word comes out barbed and distinct and alarming. “It needs to change. We’ve got the tools to change it. I’m ready to kill whoever I have to in _order_ to change it.”

“Man, just kill whoever you _want_ to,” says Komori, and when Sudo frowns round at him he rolls his eyes, and shrugs. “I’m just _saying_.”

“I’m in,” says Satomi, again, determinedly. 

“I’m –” starts Bungo, and then he stops. Komori’s still running one hand along the pommel of his knife dragon; Satomi has two fistfuls of bedsheet squeezed tight between her fingers; Sudo has leaned back, relaxed in his chair, with his legs crossed at the ankle and a perfectly peaceable expression. He wonders: _what’s the worst that could happen if I do?_ and his imagination provides very readily so instead he wonders: _what’s the worst that could happen to Satomi if I don’t?_ and answers come even faster. 

Satomi’s eyes are flickering back and forth and back again across his face. Her expression’s still cold but her shoulders are tense, and her breath’s coming out jagged and uneven at the edges. He’s always told himself he’d die for her – he’d kill for her – he’d do _anything_ to keep her safe – but in his whole life so far all he’s ever done is start a few fights for her, get suspended from school for a couple weeks for her: and that’s nothing. 

“Okay,” he says, before he can stop to regret it, “sure – there’s a load of shit wrong with the world at the moment, so – yeah. We could do with some new rules round here. Sign me up, stick my name down, get me a membership card – I’m in.”

“Good,” says Satomi. 

Her expression doesn’t change but after all these years Bungo can read her like he reckons she can’t even read herself: and she means it, so it’s worth it. 

“Welcome,” says Sudo, warmly. “I have no doubt you’ll be valuable to our ongoing war effort.”

Well – Bungo’s pretty sure it’s worth it. 

“You know I’d have killed you if you said no,” says Komori, with a manic kind of glitter to his eyes. “Sliced you just enough so you could _feel_ it as you died.”

“You’ve sure got a way about you, huh, Komori-kun?” says Bungo, weakly, and when he tries to laugh Sudo and Komori both laugh louder. 

Bungo hopes to _God_ it’s worth it.


End file.
